Bonanzas and Small Change

ByLuke Jerod Kummer James is mad as hell about something or other involving money-I don't ask-and we're tromping through the streets of Brooklyn in giant strides. He's got a farmhand's build, autumn-wheat hair and a scar that extends to the right side of his frown. In his hand is a metal detector as big as a bazooka. Every morning James wakes up believing he might strike it rich on that very date. "One attic, one backyard or behind one door," he trails off as we head out to dig up whatever fortune is buried in Prospect Park. "You take a ring and throw it as hard as you want at the grass, and you ain't gonna hear it make a sound," he explains. "The dog walkers, that's another thing. Tissues they use to clean up with, they put in the same pocket as their change. They pull out the tissues and where do you think the change goes?" James, the 48-year-old manager of my Brooklyn Heights building, is a demolition man by trade. People pay him to go into an apartment that's being prepped for rehab and strip it bare. He works cheap and makes deals with the owners to keep whatever he finds-light fixtures, copper pipes, lost earrings. When he's not demolishing, he's detecting, as he has done since he roamed cemeteries with a metal detector as a kid. Passing through the gates of Grand Army Plaza, he pries a Newport from a crumpled box with his incisors. His words wagging the cigarette up and down, he recounts how he once repaid a fellow treasure hunter who told him to shove off to some other part of the park. "So I bought four packs of staples from Staples on Third Avenue and flung 'em all around," he says. "Guy comes back and his detector goes ballistic. That's what happens when you got a cheap $500 machine." James stops to admire his own instrument, which he says costs more than five times as much, and demonstrates how its screen displays images of beer tops, aluminum foil, coins, jewelry or nails before he even digs. He has explored most of Prospect Park including the gay pickup spot to our left that other metal-detecting guys won't go near. "Why? Because of the Ninja Killer. He jumps out with a black suit every so often and slices people up with a samurai sword." I thank him for the heads up. James has plans for the fortune he's going to make and his plan to get it is to keep his eyes open. When he enters a room, he scans the spaces beneath radiators, the crack between floor and wall and the tops of cabinets. Every time we meet in the hallway, we talk about his latest find. The other day, he laid an age-old violin with a carved monkey grinning on its scroll at my feet. He'd disinterred it after ripping open a wall behind a pantry in an old building nearby. Another time he called to his 10-year-old son to bring a silver pendant found while detecting. "Pure," he said and pointed to the shiny semblance of retrocopulation. When James was in his early twenties, he lost his job and chose the Marines over being out of work and living in his car. He came back from Lebanon as broke as when he left and took up manual labor. Then one day, in a shed inside a warehouse he was gutting, he came upon a caché of diamonds that would make a pirate blush. He put his newborn in a stroller and took his wife with him to Jeweler's Row. On the way back they tucked a fold of dollars behind the infant's head. James bought the best metal detector he could find, built a house in Puerto Rico and planned to live out his days combing the beaches. If only things turned out that way. Dark clouds had followed us to the park and now thunder is rumbling in the distance. The headphones on James' ears buzz a mosquito-like sound, which grows louder and fainter as he pans his detector side to side. The wind picks up and scatters leaves, and I see James on his knees carving a circular wound in the ground with a painter's spatula. He flips over a hangnail of sod and reaches into the earth. A nightcrawler squirms across his knuckles. He plucks out a dime that looks like it was found on the Titanic. Within an hour we have 65 cents in a baggy and are nearly swimming in the downpour. We take shelter beneath a bridge, where James tells me why he's scouring for coins here, instead of scouring for coins on a nice, sunny spot in the Caribbean. "At a beach, one person out of a hundred will lose money, one in a hundred-thousand loses something gold." He explains. "Where I was in Puerto Rico, is like parts of New Jersey where you got only a few hundred people visit the beach each day. That percentage, it goes down." So instead James sunk his savings into scuba equipment and boats to look for doubloons. By the time Hurricane Georges blew his house away, his money was long gone. James lived with his wife's family in Puerto Rico for about a year afterward. "I filled up two army duffle bags every day, and I carried them like this full of aluminum cans, made the beggars hate me," he says. Finally, he collected enough money for three airfares to New York. "When I got home I was so thin my friends thought I was dying of AIDS." James did the only things he knew how-got back into demolition, kept his eyes peeled and taught his son to always look down in case somebody drops a buck. When the rain lets up, we hike over to a ridge. James saw people there earlier lying with their knees up, their pockets veritable ski shoots for coins.